My Husband and I

by Ingrid Seward

  They eat a small first course – usually a mousse – and then it’s straight into the roast beef, which the chef has already carved in the kitchen. The roast – medium done, never pink – will be beautifully, thinly cut and served with roast potatoes and greens – either cabbage served in small bundles, or spring greens and fresh peas. Nothing is ever frozen. They are all rather partial to an apple turnover pudding, and this is a favourite finish to the Sunday meal.

  Lunch takes no more than an hour. Then they’re up and, after coffee, head straight outside. Unlike many of her subjects, the Queen does not have a Sunday afternoon nap. Prince Philip, with his love of cooking, has found a new passion – foodie TV shows – and the Queen makes a great joke of teasing him about his craze for watching all the cookery programmes. Mary Berry is a favourite. ‘The Duke of Edinburgh understands cooking,’ Berry says. ‘I’m very lucky to have had lunch with the Queen. I was seated next to the duke – a delightful man – who talked about barbecuing. He was saying that he took his game birds at Sandringham and stuffed them with haggis but put more breadcrumbs in to absorb the fat . . . you knew he knew what he was talking about.’

  Prince Philip certainly knows what he is talking about when it comes to food and cooking. In the days when he used to travel abroad frequently, he would always return with some new dish he urged the Buckingham Palace chefs to try. They dreaded the sound of his purposeful footfall as he made his way to the kitchens to bark out instructions. If the dish didn’t arrive at the table exactly as he remembered it, then there would be another visit to the kitchen and a searching discussion to find out what went wrong. Philip always explained what was not quite right and exactly how it could be done in the future. Of course, Philip doesn’t just preach, he practises and, according to those who have sampled his food, he is no mean cook.

  One of his most ambitious dishes used to be snipe which, after shooting it at Sandringham, he plucked, cleaned and prepared himself. He arranged to be called especially early in the morning so he could get the snipe ready before breakfast. While he was out on his day’s duties, the snipe remained in the larder almost under armed guard and when he returned in the evening he quickly changed and set about cooking the bird. Philip has his own cookbook with his favourite recipes he has ordered for himself. One was a casserole of pigeon, cooked according to a Swedish recipe, and he would go out a shoot a brace just because he fancied them.

  Philip liked to cook breakfast for himself and the Queen and was famous for his glass-topped electric frying pan, which had to travel everywhere with him. Omelettes were his speciality and he was good at producing quick light supper snacks which he and the Queen enjoyed after the staff had been dismissed. Scrambled egg, smoked haddock, kidneys, mushrooms and bean shoots with mushrooms and chicken livers were favourites, but nothing is as good to him as open-aired barbecuing, as Mary Berry testified.

  When Charles and Anne were young, Prince Philip would take them off in a Land Rover, each with a sleeping bag, a supply of milk, tea, bread, eggs and bacon – and his mobile barbecue. They would drive high onto the moors and camp for the night in one of Queen Victoria’s little stone shelters. Water for tea and washing was fetched from a nearby burn and Philip taught them how to make a fire of dried heather and twigs.

  Larger picnics for the royal family and their guests are still frequent at Balmoral. Food is ready to be loaded into the Land Rovers by ten o’clock and the royal party usually arrive at their destination by noon. Once his barbecue is going, Philip produces a rapid selection of chops, steaks, sausages and game. He not only cooks for the family but the chauffeurs and detective in the party as well. If there is a stream handy, the Queen insists on doing the washing up, but nowadays they usually lunch at one of the huts on the estate, where the Queen has better facilities for her dish-washing. When he was prime minister, Tony Blair was astounded to see the monarch in her rubber gloves doing the washing up.

  ‘The royals cook and serve the guests,’ Blair said. ‘They do the washing up. You think I’m joking, but I am not. They put the gloves on and stick their hands in the sink. You sit there having eaten and the Queen asks if you’ve finished, she stacks the plates and goes off to the sink.’

  No doubt he missed the point and was unable to understand why, with so many staff available, the Queen should choose to do something as mundane as washing up herself. But both the Queen and Philip become very attached to their staff, who are like an extended part of the family to them, and they often take a sympathetic attitude to them when they land in trouble. On one occasion, Philip noticed that a certain footman had been missing for a few days and asked his page where he had got to. ‘He was sacked, Sir,’ the page told him. Philip wanted to know what he had done.

  ‘I am afraid they found him in bed with one of the housemaids, Sir,’ the page replied.

  ‘And they sacked him?’ the duke said, outraged. ‘They should have given him a medal!’

  When he was younger, Philip’s personal staff hardly ever saw him for any length of time as he travelled so much, but now he is much older he is always around and always shouting at them. But, being used to him and knowing he doesn’t mean it, they don’t take too much notice and behind his back refer to him as ‘father’.

  Philip was most distressed when two of his valets died from heart attacks, one in the most dramatic of circumstances. Back in 1976, the Queen and the duke were guests at Lord Dalhousie’s estate in Scotland and were part of the shooting party. Valet Joe Pearce, who had been with the royal family for many years, was acting as Philip’s loader. The Queen was behind watching with binoculars, working her dogs and picking up the shot grouse. She saw a figure fall and for one awful moment thought it was the duke and ran as fast as she could to where the two men were. The duke was fine but Pearce was dead.

  Prince Philip had his body sent back to his family and a special memorial service was arranged at St James’s Piccadilly, which he attended. This was a significant mark of respect, as the only memorials or funerals the Queen and the duke attend in a private capacity are those of very close friends or staff.

  One such occasion took place when Bobo MacDonald, who worked for the Queen for sixty-seven years, finally died. When Bobo’s health eventually failed, the Queen hired round-the-clock private nurses to care for her in her suite of rooms at Buckingham Palace. When she died in September 1993, as a mark of her devotion the Queen came down to London from Balmoral for the funeral, which took place at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace.

  Bobo was much more than a dresser, she was a close friend and one of the very few people who could say anything to the Queen that she thought she ought to know. She could mention with great honesty if perhaps the Queen had not put up a perfect appearance or if a colour they had both chosen did not suit her, and there were times when this daughter of a Scottish railwayman did exactly that. Like many of the female retainers who had devoted their lives to royal service, Miss MacDonald, as she was called by other staff, always faintly resented the presence of her mistress’s husband. Philip would in turn try to keep her firmly in her place. He believed her role was to open the curtains in the morning and let the dogs in – tasks she had performed every morning for many years before Prince Philip came on the scene. They eventually came to an amicable non-spoken agreement to keep out of each other’s way.

  On the anniversary of Bobo’s fifty years’ service, the Queen had a special commemorative brooch made for her by Garrard, the crown jewellers. Mr Summers, who then held the royal warrant, was sent for and smuggled in and out of the palace behind Bobo’s back to help the Queen choose assorted designs. The final gift was in the shape of a flower. It had twenty-five diamonds, which represented the crown, and twenty-five gold stamens, which represented the good that Bobo had brought into the Queen’s life.

  It was a token of love and respect for a woman who was quite simply the Queen’s last link with childhood. She had given her life selflessly in service and never expected anything in return. Despite h
is irritation with her constant presence, Prince Philip knew and respected that sentiment more than he would ever admit.

  For the truth of the matter is that socially they still rely on each other, and after seventy years of marriage that will never change. On the weekend of the Diamond Jubilee, when Prince Philip was taken ill during lunch at Windsor Castle after his marathon stint at the cold, wet and windy river pageant the day before, the Queen was heard to say as her husband was taken into the King Edward VII hospital as a ‘precautionary measure’ for a bladder infection: ‘Don’t die on me. Not now anyway!’

  Of course, she was being facetious and making light of the situation, but it is part of the affectionate and light-hearted relationship they have always had since the days the young Prince Philip used to chase her along the Buckingham Palace corridors wearing an enormous set of false teeth.

  That evening, the Queen attended the jubilee concert outside Buckingham Palace without him. She has never panicked or stumbled, and she was not going to start then. But it was a worry for her and when she arrived at the Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral the following day, she looked very alone. It was something she was going to have to get used to as the decade wore on. However together they are as a couple and however much they help each other socially, there will unfortunately come a time when one of them will have to go it alone.

  Chapter 14

  DEFENDER OF THE FAITH

  Throughout their long marriage, the Queen and Prince Philip have shared a life as practising, church-going Christians, but the origins of each of their faiths is very different. Prince Philip was baptised into the Greek Orthodox Church and, although he was educated through the English school system that includes chapel attendance, he was not received into the Church of England until shortly before his marriage to Princess Elizabeth. According to the then Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Geoffrey Fisher, Lieutenant Mountbatten RN, as he then was, ‘always regarded himself as an Anglican’.

  That the Queen is a deeply religious committed Christian has never been in doubt, and her commitment to her faith runs much deeper. She was christened in the chapel at Buckingham Palace on 26 May 1926 by the then Archbishop of York and confirmed when she was fifteen years old in the Private Chapel at Windsor Castle by William Temple, Fisher’s predecessor as the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  From a very early age, she was brought up to say her prayers both in the morning before breakfast and in the evening before going to bed. This tradition was instilled by her mother and continued by her nanny Clara Knight. Both Elizabeth and later Margaret never missed kneeling at the foot of their bed with their hands clasped in prayer. It was as much part of their daily life as brushing their hair and getting dressed.

  Going to church on Sunday has been part of her routine throughout her life, wherever she happens to be. At Windsor, she has St George’s Chapel, which was founded in 1348 by King Edward III as the mother church to the Order of the Garter. The chapel is large and impersonal and extremely ornate, with seventy-six heraldic statues representing the Queen’s Beasts on its roof, standing on pinnacles. The chapel has often been used for royal weddings, and the union of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005 received a blessing there from the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Queen and Prince Philip are not frequently seen on Sundays at St George’s, as neither of them enjoy sermons. Philip has instructed the Dean of Windsor that sermons must be limited to not more than twelve minutes long.

  Much more intimate is the private chapel in the castle. It was destroyed by the fire in 1992 and rebuilt with only twenty-five seats. The new organ had to be designed to fit into a very small triangular loft. In the grounds of Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park there is another chapel, Queen Victoria’s Chapel, or the Royal Chapel, where the Queen and Prince Philip regularly worship. When the Queen Mother was still alive, it was a Sunday ritual to attend the service at the Royal Chapel and retire afterwards to Royal Lodge for some stiff pre-lunch drinks. Like her daughter, Queen Elizabeth had a traditional and uncomplicated faith and derived a great deal of support from it.

  The Queen takes communion only three or four times a year in the old Low Church tradition, and according to her former deputy private secretary, Sir Kenneth Scott, ‘She prefers simplicity to pomposity, so when she’s at Windsor she’ll go to the little chapel in the park rather than St George’s, which she considers rather pompous. In Edinburgh, too, she doesn’t go to St Giles’. She prefers the Canongate Kirk as she liked the minister who made her laugh.’

  When the royal family is staying at Sandringham, the crowds turn out in all weathers to greet them when they go to Sunday services at St Mary Magdalene’s Church, 400 yards from the big house on the Sandringham estate. The sixteenth-century church, with its richly decorated chancel and magnificent silver altar, has been the site of many significant christenings, including those of the future King George VI in 1896 and Lady Diana Spencer, whose parents lived on the Sandringham estate in 1961. The most recent one came in July 2015, when Princess Charlotte of Cambridge, their great-granddaughter, was christened there.

  When they are in Scotland at Balmoral, the Queen and Prince Philip have the royal pew at Crathie Kirk, a small Church of Scotland parish church. The Princess Royal married her second husband, Timothy Laurence, at the church because she was divorced and, at the time, not permitted to marry in the Church of England.

  Even when the royal family were at sea, on board the royal yacht Britannia in the days when overseas tours were a regular part of the royal calendar, there would always be a service held on a Sunday. Admiral Woodard, one-time commodore of Britannia, said that the Queen preferred not to travel with a chaplain on board because she did not like sermons. Instead, she would ask Admiral Woodard to take the service. He added: ‘But she knows her Bible. I’d go to the Queen with suggestions about readings and hymns and she would quote the Bible without bothering to look it up. The prescribed reading might start at, say, verse nine, but the Queen would say: “No, let’s start at verse seven, otherwise it won’t have the proper sense.” ’

  Time and again in her Christmas Day speeches to the nation and the Commonwealth, the Queen has stressed the importance of her religious beliefs. In the millennial year address, she said: ‘To many of us our beliefs are of fundamental importance. For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ’s words and example.’

  Again, as part of the television broadcast she made in 2015, she said: ‘For me, the life of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, whose birth we celebrate today, is an inspiration and an anchor in my life. A role model of reconciliation and forgiveness, he stretched out his hands in love, acceptance and healing. Christ’s example has taught me to seek to respect and value all people of whatever faith or none.’

  The Queen gave a rare personal insight when she wrote about her religious faith in the foreword to a book entitled The Servant Queen and the King She Serves, published by the Bible Society in 2016 to mark her ninetieth birthday. ‘I have been – and remain – very grateful to you for your prayers and to God for his steadfast love,’ the Queen wrote. ‘I have indeed seen his faithfulness.’ She then went on to write about the changes she has experienced during her lifetime: ‘The extent and pace of change has been truly remarkable,’ she said. ‘We have witnessed triumphs and tragedies.’

  The Queen also took the opportunity to allude to the current problems in the Middle East, saying the world was experiencing ‘terrible suffering on an unprecedented scale’. The foreword was very much along the lines of her Christmas speeches, which are the only ones that she writes herself – or partly herself. Prince Philip, an extremely experienced speechwriter, is known to provide his input to the Christmas speeches and consequently they also reflect his own views and beliefs – another example of how the partnership of their marriage works.

  The Queen’s f
aith goes beyond her public pronouncements and private devotions, however. That she reigns through her belief in God is intrinsic to the sovereign. A one pound coin in the United Kingdom bears an image of the Queen’s head, surrounded by the words: ‘ELIZABETH II D·G·REG·F·D.’ It stands for ‘Elizabeth II Dei Gratia Regina Fidei Defensor’ or ‘Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, Queen, Defender of the Faith’. This notation was first added to British coins in 1714, during the reign of King George I. The decision of the Royal Mint to omit it from the ‘Godless Florin’ in 1849 caused such a scandal that the coin had to be replaced.

  The sovereign holds the title ‘Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England’, and this dates back to the reign of King Henry VIII, who was initially granted the title of Defender of the Faith in 1521 by Pope Leo X. It was Queen Elizabeth I who was first proclaimed ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church of England, a title that has remained to this day. In her role as Supreme Governor, the Queen is spiritual leader of the 25 million people in the UK who are baptised in the Church of England, though only about one million of them go to church each week. This is mainly a ceremonial role, because in practice the church is led by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops.

  The Queen has well-informed opinions and views on many of her bishops and likes those who make her laugh, are straightforward and intelligent. She found George Carey too much of a moralist and disliked the way he criticised her children’s behaviour. She might have shared his view, but felt Christianity was as much about forgiveness as morality. She very much likes the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who employs former royal press secretary Ailsa Anderson as his own director of communications.